Monday, April 15, 2013

When it comes to love, or most things in life, are most men
and women really just from Earth and not on different planets? Bobbi Carothers
and Harry Reis recently published a (great) paper on this subject in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology. You can find the abstract for this paper
online, here. Many media stories were appropriately nuanced though, I must say,
judging from my reading of tweets and various news accounts, other outlets did overplay
the idea that there are no differences between men and women. Here are a few
examples of some of the solid media stories on their research.(Here and Here and There).

Carothers and Reis did something different from what has
been done before. They conducted a variety of complex statistical procedures to
examine if differences between men and women that are commonly assumed to exist
(and often found) were more a matter of degree or of type.That’s a pretty interesting way to study
this.

One of the links above is for an example in a Huffington
Post piece by Emma Gray (the first of the three links to other stories above). She presents very nice graphs of differences in men
and women on physical strength versus assertiveness. You can see the type of
thing that Carothers and Reis were studying very nicely in those graphs. On
physical strength, there is a clear, distinct, difference between men and women—different
types. In contrast, on assertiveness, there is a messy, complicated pattern
that reflects more of a difference that is an uneven matter of degree. Strength:
different planets. Assertiveness: different zip codes, and pretty much coed
living zones at that.

Here’s a way to think about some of their findings. Let’s
say you have a new job at a mall. You have been put in charge of directing
people to the restroom when they ask where it is. But you only get to know one
piece of information about a person to tell them where to go when they need to
go. You do not get to see or hear the person needing direction. You just know
one small piece of information. It’s really a strange job, but in these times,
you hang onto what you can.

Okay, on day one of your new job, you get to know how
physically strong a person is before you decide which way to send him or her. In
your awesomeness, you send most people to the right restroom. You miss some,
but you are mostly on a roll. On the next day, you only get to know the scores
of people on a little paper and pencil test of assertiveness. Therefore, you
only really know how assertive each person thinks he or she is. It’s a much
harder day and you do pretty poorly. In fact, you send people to the wrong
restroom 45% of the time. Ouch. There are complaints. But you have renewed hope
about the third day because, on the third day, you will get to know how much
people say they love to have just sit and talk with their best friends before
deciding which restroom to send them off to use. It will be a better day.

The strength difference really works more like a difference
in type. An individual’s level of assertiveness is just not very informative
about if they are a male or a female.

Carothers and Reis refer to differences as either dimensional
or taxonic. If it’s dimensional, it’s something men and women may have an average
difference but they are not in different planetary orbits. When things are dimensional
(as in one dimensional), there might be a difference with males or females
tending to score higher or lower, but the overlap in the range of scores is so
great that you are better off learning who the individual is than making any assumptions
based on knowing their sex.

What did Carothers and Reis find? Here’s a summary. They
write:

Although gender differences on
average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly
gender-typed individuals is. That is, there are not two distinct genders, but
instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as
masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous (like most social,
psychological, and individual difference variables).

Carothers and Reis found that the evidence suggests men and
women live on the same planet when it comes to variables such as the following:

Masculinity/Femininity (measured on
questionnaires about attitudes)

Fear of Success

Science Inclination

Personality traits

Centrality of concepts like caring,
trust, support to what one thinks love is

Sexual attitudes and behaviors

Keep in mind they are not saying there are no differences
between men and women on these dimensions, just that the differences were not
really differences in type. They also were not studying everything. For
example, their paper does not discuss other dimensions such as abilities in
math, languages, science, etc. There are other whole literatures on those types
of variables (and most are dimensional as well, even though these sophisticated
types of analyses have maybe not been done on those dimensions yet.)

How about Taxons? What variables did they find evidence of
planetary differences?

Physical Strength (as noted above)

Anthropometric measurements

Sex-stereotyped Activities

In that latter category, questions were asked about enjoyment
of things such as playing golf, boxing, construction, watching pornography,
scrapbooking, beauty design, watching talk shows.You get the idea. Yes, men and women seemed
categorically different in their interests in these things—and I bet you can
pretty directly guess how those differences played out.

Next time, I will talk more about two of the categories above:
(1) sexual attitudes and behaviors and (2) sex-stereotypes activities. The
findings were more nuanced than my simple summary here suggests on the first of
these, and the findings were more gendered than many media stories suggested,
based on the latter. More to come.

About Me

I am a research professor who conducts studies on marriage and romantic relationships. Along with my colleagues, I also develop materials to help people in their relationships based on research.
In addition to academic publications, I have written or co-written a number of books (see below). Together with colleagues Howard Markman and Natalie Jenkins, I head up a team at PREP, Inc. that produces various materials for use in marriage and relationship education. Howard Markman, Galena Rhoades, and I head up our research team at the University of Denver.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three of the most important theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."